Free Republic

Ground zero has been stolen, right from under our noses. How do we get it back?

Dear Kevin, Sign our petition and protect free speech in the Senate! www.democrats.org/freespeech Governor Howard Dean wrote to you this week about the threat to free speech in the Senate. Nearly 200,000 of us immediately weighed in against the Republican push to throw away the rules and principles of our democracy. We won't let them pack our courts with lifetime appointments for right-wing extremists. The massive reaction helped beat back this power grab this week, but this is not over. They reportedly plan to keep pressing over the next few weeks until a showdown in April. One Republican Senator was...

March 18, 2005 -- ALBANY — Pro-choice Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton sought "common ground" again on the hot-button abortion issue yesterday, joining pro-life Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, to back a measure she said would reduce abortions. "We can find not only common ground, but common sense in the 'Prevention First' amendment we are offering today," said Mrs. Clinton, touting a $100 million plan to expand access to contraception devices and birth-control information. Clinton raised eyebrows in pro-choice circles — and stimulated further talk of potential presidential ambitions for 2008 — in January with an Albany speech in which...

The poll underscores just how little headway Mr. Bush has made in his effort to build popular support as his proposal for overhauling Social Security struggles to gain footing in Congress. At the same time, there has been an increase in respondents who say that efforts to restore order in Iraq are going well, even as an overwhelming number of Americans say Mr. Bush has no clear plan for getting out of Iraq.

February 15, 2005 -- Black and Hispanic teenagers in New York state graduate from high school at roughly half the rate of white students — nearly the largest disparity in the nation, a new study shows. While the 81-percent high school graduation rate for whites in New York held steady between 1997 and 2002 — the years the study examined — the rates slipped to 42 percent from 47 percent for blacks and to 36 percent from 39 percent for Hispanics. "It confirms what a lot of people have long talked about and suspected, that New York particularly serves its...

WASHINGTON - Howard Dean (news - web sites) promised cheering supporters Wednesday night he would harness their energy to lead the Democratic Party back to power in the halls of Congress and the White House by 2008. The virtually certain incoming chairman of the Democratic National Committee (news - web sites) rallied hundreds of young supporters, and a few he called "young at heart," in a campaign-style appearance at a Washington nightspot within view of the Capitol. In his first public appearance since clinching the chairmanship, he gave a glimpse of the kind of uncompromising leadership he plans for the...

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid on Monday urged President Bush to stop the Republican National Committee from calling him an obstructionist and criticizing his Senate record, a tactic the GOP used to help defeat Reid's predecessor... "Why didn't he stand and tell the American people last Wednesday that one of the first items of business we were going to do in Washington is send out a hit piece on the Democratic leader?" Reid said. The Republican committee plans to send a 13-page document to more than a million people -- including in Reid's home state of Nevada -- analyzing and...

ROCKLAND - Free speech clashed with free expression on a downtown street corner Saturday as artists opposed to war protested the showing of combat paintings of Marine Sgt. Michael Fay at the Farnsworth Art Museum. Sgt. Fay stood ramrod straight when confronted by the small group of protesters upset with the Farnsworth for exhibiting his paintings of combat forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The afternoon sun reflected off the combat ribbons pinned to his green uniform, and the red chevrons on his sleeves glinted in the finish of his spit-shined shoes as Fay listened to his challengers. Fay told the...

A UNLV professor under fire for comments he made about homosexuals during a class lecture last year demanded Friday that the university stop threatening to punish him. "I have done absolutely nothing wrong," said the professor, Hans Hoppe, a conservative libertarian economist with almost 20 years teaching experience at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, on Hoppe's behalf, sent a letter to UNLV officials alleging that the university violated Hoppe's free speech rights and his right to academic freedom. "The charge against professor Hoppe is totally specious and without merit," reads the letter...

The president went into the speech fortified by his narrow but decisive victory over Senator John Kerry in November...

Dear Kevin, Today, the day of George W. Bush's second inauguration, Republicans are hoping that we'll just fade into the background. They're hoping that for the next two years we sit on the sidelines, and let them ram their agenda through. But we Democrats will never step aside. While Bush tries to build his legacy on a series of attacks against working families, the middle class, and seniors, Democrats will be there to stand up. We will fight President Bush and his Republican cronies as they try to: Shift the tax burden away from the wealthiest to working families and...

Dear Kevin, Join the million-strong Democrats who are standing up to fight for what we believe in. Last week, James Carville sent you a message asking you to join him this Inauguration Day by renewing your financial support of the Democratic Party. Your response has been incredible. We've nearly made it to our goal of 1,000,000 people renewing their support by tomorrow. This is your chance to stand up and tell President Bush that his narrow victory in 2004 gave him neither a mandate nor a blank check. Now is the time to send a clear signal to the Washington...

Kerry, who lost the November election to President Bush, is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his trip to Paris closes a European and Middle East tour that included trips to Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Israel and the West Bank. He was set to meet with Chirac just hours after talks in London with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on the prospect of peace in the Middle East. With the Jan. 30 Iraq elections on the horizon and the election of a new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, still fresh, Kerry made his tour at a critical time. He...

Dear Kevin, "What are you going to do on Inauguration Day?" At least in Washington, that's a question you hear Democrats asking one another as George W. Bush's inaugural celebration approaches. Do you want to know my answer? Join the million-strong Democrats who are standing up to fight for what we believe in. I'm going to stand with over a million grassroots Democrats who have entered 2005 with a fighting spirit by renewing their 2005 financial support for the Democratic Party in advance of January 20. Look, we Democrats can either swallow all of the Republicans' malarkey about "the people...

If conservatives are giving birth at a rate that is 25% higher than liberals, what will that mean 20 years from now or 50 years from now? These Christian children are not going to be exposed to a well-rounded public education. They are going to be taught a skewed view of American history, i.e. we were founded as a Christian nation—when in fact the early leaders of America were mostly deists, Unitarians, or held beliefs more similar to today’s mainline liberal denominations. The fanatical Christian conservative movement is actually a 20th century phenomenon and for them to stake some claim...

Dear Kevin, I need your immediate help. You've probably heard about the extremely close race for governor here in Washington. Only 42 votes separate my opponent and me, and thousands of ballots across the state haven't been counted. This is by far the closest race in the history of our state, and one of the closest the nation has ever seen. That means we must make sure that every single legitimate ballot has been counted -- and that means a statewide manual recount of every vote. Washington state law requires the party requesting the recount to pay for it, and...

Dear Kevin, I want to thank you for everything you've done over the course of this campaign. Time and time again we asked for your help, and you were always there for us. Even though we didn't win back the White House, you created something historic. Our grassroots campaign of hope and optimism was unprecedented in American politics. More than 1 million volunteers made 11 million person-to-person, door-to-door contacts, and made 38 million phone calls to voter in battleground states. If you were involved in these grassroots activities, we want to hear from you about your experience. What did you...

Did anyone else attend the GOP Rally in Morristown, NJ yesterday? Governor Pataki came over from New York and did a great job. Democrats, once again showing their belief in free speech and the free exchange of ideas, did their best to shout down the governor throughout the rally.

Kerry's belief in working with allies runs so deep that he has maintained that the loss of American life can be better justified if it occurs in the course of a mission with international support. In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."

You can tell it's getting close to Election Day, because the senior scare campaign is back. John Kerry got things going over the weekend with an accusation that President Bush is planning a "January surprise" to "privatize" Social Security. And, right on time, his campaign is rolling out an ad that claims Mr. Bush "has a plan that cuts Social Security benefits by 30% to 45%." We are supposed to believe that the peg for this accusation is a story in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, by Bush antagonist Ron Suskind, that the President told a group of donors he...